Category: Philosophy

Good piece by Mark Rowlands over at Secular Philosophy. ((This site looks like it’s going to be a must-read; I hope they fix the RSS feed issues soon.)) Let’s tee up the problem:

The efforts of a young philosophy instructor – let us call him ‘Wayne’ – to acquaint his students with the wonders of philosophy of religion are stymied when one of his students complains to Wayne’s Dean on the grounds that his religious beliefs are being violated. ‘I have a right to my beliefs’, the student says. What the student seems to mean by this is other people have a duty to not criticize his beliefs. The right to believe is the right to be exempt from criticism.

All reasonable people would agree that this is absurd: as Mark put it, how can one person have the right to say “P” while everybody else is forbidden from saying “not-P”? But let’s take it a bit further: does one have the right not to have one’s belief changed? Mark invokes “Wilfred Sellars’ distinction between the space of causes and the space of reasons” to argue that forcible methods (“causes”) such as lobotomy and brain-washing are illegitimate while arguments (“reasons”) are acceptable. I think that’s right, but I’d suggest that human psychology is such that these two categories are not as neat as we might think. In what category does a blatantly false argument fall? As a practical matter, all beliefs are based on partial information, unless we are dealing with closed systems such as mathematics. A false formulation of “not-P” (based on an incorrect premise or invalid reasoning) may cause the believer to lose their belief “P”, even if the falsehood were discovered. (The idea might be “tainted”, or the form of “not-P” might lead them to suspect that other versions of the same argument might be true.)
So does a false argument fall into the “space of causes” or the “space of reasons”? Does intent matter?

In her contribution to The Edge, Rebecca Goldstein takes on the Popperian idea that scientific thinking inevitably involves falsifiability, and the false (but seductive) inferences that can follow:

Finally, I’ve come to think that identifying scientificality with falsifiability lets certain non-scientific theories off the hook, by saying that we should try to find good reasons to believe whether a theory is true or false only when that theory is called “science.” It allows believers to protect their pet theories by saying that they can’t be, and shouldn’t be, subject to falsification, just because they’re clearly not scientific theories. Take the theory that there’s an omnipotent, omniscient, beneficent God. It may not be a scientific hypothesis, but it seems to me to be eminently falsifiable; in fact, it seems to have been amply falsified.   But because falsifiability is seen as demarcating the scientific, and since theism is so clearly not scientific, believers in religious ideologies get a free pass. The same is true for many political ideologies. The parity between scientific and nonscientific ideas is concealed by thinking that there’s a simple test that distinguishes science from nonscience, and that that test is falsifiability.

I’ve finally finished Steven Pinker’s wonderful new book The Stuff of Thought. The question it poses is deceptively simple: what can the way we use language tell us about the way the mind works? The investigation, laid out in nearly 500 pages of sparkling prose, takes us from verb forms, to Jerry Fodor’s outrageous “extreme nativism”, to the vocabularies of space and time, to Bill Clinton’s testimony, to the metaphor metaphor, to Kripke’s “rigid designators”, to swearing, to bribing the maitre d’. But the result of this diversity is a remarkably simple, coherent, and plausible theory that describes how human beings manage the collection of thoughts which make up our models of the world and our relationships to others.
Pinker’s conclusions are summarized in five pages (428-432) of the last chapter of his book. I found myself re-reading the chapter several times, with highlighter in hand, and eventually I typed up the phrases that I’d highlighted and knitted them together into a “summary of the summary”. I’m including it below the fold. All the memorable words are Pinker’s; the crude packaging is mine.
One aspect of this model is its relationship to brain structure. Although he mentions many important experimental results in connection with individual steps in the investigation, Pinker downplays this when he comes to summarize his theory. Many of its elements are already verified by experimental work, and the functional level of the model is such that most of the more controversial or speculative bits should be susceptible to experimental [dis]confirmation over the next few years. This won’t stop the mysterians like Chalmers from pressing their forms of dualism, but it should give us a solid functional model for humans or zombies…
Although I talk about “Pinker’s theory”, it is obviously based on the work of many others. Nevertheless, I think I shall find myself referring, perhaps silently, to “the Pinker model” as I read about consciousness, psychology, philosophy of mind, and so forth.
Continue reading “Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought"”

Here’s ‘a lovely tribute to Dan Dennett by Richard Dawkins:

Since the deaths of Bill Hamilton and John Maynard Smith, I have been rather short of intellectual heroes to consult on difficult questions. Thank goodness we still have Dan Dennett.

Yes indeed. All heroes should be teachers. Looking back on it, Dan’s Philosophy of Mind course that I took in 2005 was one of the most important passages of my life. In the words of Walt Whitman, such experiences raise us up and then “level that lift, to pass and continue beyond.”

Jeremy Seabrook has an excellent piece in CiF on the way in which “the economy” has become the new religion. A comment by Ieuan is worth reproducing at length:

“The economy now has to be treated with a veneration long lost to mere religion.”

Thank you Jeremy. I thought I was the only one who was seeing the connection between the superstition of religion and the superstition of believing in the economy – a superstition which is admitted by ‘the market’ when they say the whole system only works due to ‘belief and confidence’.
Like ancient babylonian priests, who held a population in thrall by being able to foretell the times of eclipses and the equinoxes (not always accurately), the modern money masters hold us all in thrall by warning of the dire consequences which will befall us all if their words are not heeded. The ‘Dow’ and the ‘Footsie’ are quoted like prayers on the news bulletins, their movements interpreted as intently as any chickens entrails were in ancient Rome.
I hear no difference in tone, nor depth of belief, between Islamic fundamentalists and city boys, they both say that we must cleave to their ‘system’ or we are lost. Both look primitive and unthinking. And both seem, to me, to be far beyond the rational…a surrender of our (individual, human) power to the irrationality of a system – whether that be ‘economics’ or ‘religion’.

Yes indeed. I remember a dinner party back in 1981, soon after I arrived in the US, at which one of the guests was waxing lyrical about capitalism, property rights, and so forth. I suggested (quite mildly) that over the last few thousand years human beings had ordered their societies according to a number of quite different patterns, that none of them had lasted all that long, and that it was ahistorical to ascribe any uniquely special virtue to any particular pattern, just because it was the system under which we happened to be living. Five hundred years from now it will look as quaint as medieval guilds do today; ten thousand years from now it will be utterly forgotten. People reacted as though I had blasphemed, which in a sense I had.

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean offers a nice piece on one of those annoying questions that keeps on popping up: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? Many religious thinkers have tried to weave this into an argument for the existence of God (or at least some kind of First Cause), but none of them stand up to serious scrutiny. There is, for example, the idea that non-existence would be “simpler” than existence, and so some kind of prime mover is necessary.

It’s easy to get tricked into thinking that simplicity is somehow preferable. After all, Occam’s Razor exhorts us to stick to simple explanations. But that’s a way to compare different explanations that equivalently account for the same sets of facts; comparing different sets of possible underlying rules for the universe is a different kettle of fish entirely.

And he points out that it’s critical to distinguish between “simpler” in the Occam sense and “simplicity” as an aesthetic preference:

And, to be honest, it’s true that most working physicists have a hope (or a prejudice) that the principles underlying our universe are in fact pretty simple. But that’s simply an expression of our selfish desire, not a philosophical precondition on the space of possible universes. When it comes to the actual universe, ultimately we’ll just have to take what we get.

As Sean concludes, the problem is that we’re making a kind of category mistake in even asking the question:

Ultimately, the problem is that the question — “Why is there something rather than nothing?” — doesn’t make any sense. What kind of answer could possibly count as satisfying? What could a claim like “The most natural universe is one that doesn’t exist” possibly mean? As often happens, we are led astray by imagining that we can apply the kinds of language we use in talking about contingent pieces of the world around us to the universe as a whole.

Those who have worked with me have said that they can tell when I’m getting warmed up on a subject when I use the words “conflate” or “equivocate”. (Another colleague’s magic phrase was “tease apart”: when he started teasing apart your ideas, it was time to duck!) Although these two words are closely related, they have quite distinct meanings, and it’s unfortunate when people misuse them. ((Not, of course, as unfortunate as the misuse of “uninterested” and “disinterested”.))
To “conflate” is to mix up several distinct issues, often (but not always) with the aim of changing the topic. To “equivocate” is to use a word that has more than one meaning in a way that obscures the distinction between those meanings. Although this can occasionally be inadvertent, it is usually intended to confuse or deceive. Obviously equivocation can be used to achieve conflation, by using a term that is meaningful in each of the issues that you wish to conflate. However the words are quite distinct: one can conflate without using equivocation, and equivocate without seeking to conflate.
All of this was prompted by reading an excellent piece in Balkinization by Deborah Hellman of the University of Maryland School of Law, in which she analyzes an important point in a recent Supreme Court decision concerning race and school admissions policy.

In his plurality opinion in Parents Involved, Justice Roberts closes his opinion with the seeming truism that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The problem with this claim is that it profits from an important conflation between two different senses of the term “discrimination.” Sometimes to discriminate is simply to draw distinctions among people or things. For example, insurers routinely discriminate between potential insurance customers on the basis of the risk each poses of making a claim against the insurer during the policy period. Other times, we use the term “discrimination” in a critical rather than a descriptive way. For example, laws forbidding blacks from sitting in the front of public buses discriminate (read wrongly discriminate) against African-Americans. When we pay attention to the two senses of the word “discrimination,” we see that Justice Roberts’ claim is far from obvious. The way to stop discrimination (i.e. wrongful discrimination) on the basis of race is to stop discriminating (i.e. drawing distinctions) on the basis of race. Is he right?

It’s a good piece, which I recommend that you read. It would have been even better if she had written “equivocation” instead of “conflation”…
🙂

I was walking back to my hotel after dinner ((Superb smoked haddock chowder at Quay’s Restaurant in Temple Bar.)) and decided to follow the route of the LUAS tramway. Near Four Courts, I encountered a woman with three small children, all chattering excitedly. One of them, a girl about eight years old, ran up to me and said, “Excuse me: are Jaffa Cakes biscuits or cakes?” Without a moment’s hesitation, I replied, “It all depends what you want the answer to be… Either can be correct.” The little girl looked pleased, but confused, while her mother smiled.

Mark Vernon has posted an excellent piece on the state of philosophy today. I won’t try to summarize it, because he covers a lot of ground, and I couldn’t do him justice. Moreover the picture is, at times, downright paradoxical. For example, Martha Nussbaum believes that philosophers are doing good, relevant, accessible work, but it isn’t being communicated:

The problem she believes is not philosophy’s: it is the media. ‘Entities such as the New York Times Book Review and other major newspapers are becoming less and less interested in the work of philosophers,’ she says, noting too that the reverse is true in continental Europe and countries like India.

Well, OK. But on the other hand…

… popular philosophy is a growth area in publishing. It is hard to supply precise figures, since many books with philosophical content fall into other categories, but in the UK at least the overall trend for the past 5 years is up. ‘There is something of a backlash against celebrity non-fiction at the moment,’ explains Giles Elliot, charts and media editor at The Bookseller. ‘The book industry is very interested in intellectual non-fiction.’

And I think I’d agree: the amount of space in the biggest bookstores that is devoted to philosophy seems to have grown significantly over the last 20 years.
Anyway, it’s an excellent article which I highly recommend, as well as his interviews with Dan Dennett and others. And like so many thought-provoking pieces, I found it via the RSS feed from Butterflies and Wheels.

There’s a wonderful piece by Steven Pinker in the latest Time, entitled The Mystery of Consciousness. After reviewing the state of research on consciousness and the brain, he considers Chalmers’ notorious “Hard question”, nods at Dan Dennett’s rebuttal, (appropriately) dismisses Searle’s quantum nonsense, and (provisionally) accepts Colin McGinn‘s “cognitive closure” view. He concludes optimistically:

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people’s sentience becomes ludicrous. “Hath not a Jew eyes?” asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath not a Jew — or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog — a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer….
Think, too, about why we sometimes remind ourselves that “life is short.” It is an impetus to extend a gesture of affection to a loved one, to bury the hatchet in a pointless dispute, to use time productively rather than squander it. I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

Indeed it is. Enjoy.